Vulnerability comes from the Latin word for "wound," vulnus. Vulnerability is the state of being open to injury, or appearing as if you are. It might be emotional, like admitting that you're in love with someone who might only like you as a friend, or it can be literal, like the vulnerability of a soccer goal that's unprotected by any defensive players.
In today's IT field, your software applications or infrastructure as system should be very secured avoiding any vulnerabilities.
A vulnerability can be defined in two ways:
1. A bug in code or a flaw in software design that can be exploited to cause harm. Exploitation may occur via an authenticated or unauthenticated attacker.
2. A gap in security procedures or a weakness in internal controls that when exploited results in a security breach.
What is Vulnerability Assessment (VA)?
A vulnerability assessment is the testing process used to identify and assign severity levels to as many security defects as possible in a planned time-frame. This process may involve automated and manual techniques with varying degrees of rigor and an emphasis on comprehensive coverage. Using a risk-based approach, vulnerability assessments
may target different layers of technology, the most common being infrastructure (host or network) and application-layer assessments.
Conducting vulnerability assessments help organizations identify vulnerabilities in their software and supporting infrastructure before a compromise can take place.
What is Penetration Testing?
A vulnerability assessment simply identifies and reports noted vulnerabilities, whereas a penetration test (Pen Test) attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities to determine whether unauthorized access or other malicious activity is possible.
Penetration testing typically includes network penetration testing and application security testing as well as controls and processes around the networks and applications, and should occur from both outside the network trying to come in (external testing) and from inside the network.
There are below key benefits of VAPT.
1. Preventing Information Loss
Can you imagine your crucial business data is hacked and its with your competitor or any unwanted hands? Sensitive information of your business if more important, and it should be highly secured.
2. Preventing Financial Loss
Similar to information loss there is direct chances of fraud (hackers, extortionists and disgruntled employees) or loss in revenue due to unreliable business systems and processes.
3. Protects Your Brand in Market
Providing due diligence and compliance to your industry regulators, customers and shareholders. Non-compliance can result in your organisation losing business, receiving heavy fines, gathering bad PR or ultimately failing. Protecting your brand by avoiding loss of consumer confidence and business reputation.
4. Essential part of compliance standards or certifications for your business
Vulnerability testing helps shape information security strategy through identifying vulnerabilities and quantifying their impact and likelihood so that they can be managed proactively; budget can be allocated and corrective measures implemented.
Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing (VAPT) are largely mandated across various industries and sectors. There are a wide-range of compliance standards that require such audits to be carried out periodically. Some of the well known standards are:
ISO 27002 / ISO 27001
PCI DSS – Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
SOX – Sarbans-Oxley Act
HIPAA – Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
TRAI – Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
DOT – Department of Telecommunication
CERT-In – Cyber Emergency Response Team of India
GLBA – The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act
NIST – National Institute of Standards and Technology
SAS 70 – Statement on Auditing Standards
COBIT – Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology
GrassDew provides consulting services, software solution services, security services and knowledge services. In our security services business steam, we also provide VAPT as one of key service.
To know more about our services you can contact me at shekhar.pawar@grassdew.com
Hopefully this article must have helped you concept of VAPT.